During periods of slow economic expansion such as that encountered by today's technology companies, budget pressure is applied to limit and reduce spending by information technology (IT) organizations within the company. In addition, significant competitive and technological changes are forcing such IT organizations to keep up, just to stay even with their competitors. The IT organizations cannot simply wait until the economy improves to move on. Furthermore, the shift to an on-demand environment for IT services increases these pressures on companies.
In response, IT organizations need to get the most possible value out of the money they do spend on IT and also get the most possible value out of their existing IT assets.
Companies which provide IT services to other companies (clients) therefore need to help clients manage their large portfolios of applications in a way which extracts the most possible value from these portfolio assets, while also transforming applications to realize the business needs of the on-demand environment, flexibility, adaptability, and agility. Senior and IT executives at client companies are focused on the objectives of drive out cost and drive in value. However, because of the complexity involved in large application portfolios, these objectives are difficult to achieve. A client may have several thousand applications in their portfolio. Management of a client's application portfolio therefore is a significant problem both for IT services companies as well as for the client IT organizations.
In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, there is defined a new process for providing such application portfolio management to a client.
It is believed that such a process would constitute a significant advancement to the IT services providing art.